Daytona USA vs Epona
I loved Daytona Racer and poured a whole summer into mastering every move and every track of the arcade game. How did I miss this?
I loved Daytona Racer and poured a whole summer into mastering every move and every track of the arcade game. How did I miss this?
Groveman Drums shows off his mad skills playing rap songs – originally mixed on synths and drum machines – played live on a real drums.
The ‘Cult of Done‘ movement went through the maker and entrepreneurial worlds after it was written in 2009. These ideas are not new, but like all things mid-2000’s, everyone was tripping all over themselves to make themselves seem like an thought leader with (oft times comically ego-driven) exercises like defining disruption theory.
A few reflective notes:
Speaking at QCon back in 2009, Tony Hoare admitted to probably one of the biggest mistakes of his career – one that every programmer knows all too well. The invention of NULL because ‘it was so easy to implement’.
I call it my billion-dollar mistake. It was the invention of the null reference in 1965.
At that time, I was designing the first comprehensive type system for references in an object oriented language (ALGOL W). My goal was to ensure that all use of references should be absolutely safe, with checking performed automatically by the compiler. But I couldn’t resist the temptation to put in a null reference, simply because it was so easy to implement. This has led to innumerable errors, vulnerabilities, and system crashes, which have probably caused a billion dollars of pain and damage in the last forty years.
It seems Sylvania’s headlight restoration kit edges out 3M, but both work really well.
As usual, Project Farm does an amazing job testing these out.
Yanko Designs reports that Miniot has decided to re-invent the record player. Miniot calls it simply Wheel. It features a neat upright design and plays records from the back. One of the most unique elements is the barely visible tactile control system that lets you press and push parts of the hidden wheel to jump tracks, change volume, and even set the stylus weight.
The Miniot site shows it runs $2187 – $4156 depending on the options and color you select.
Joshua Vasquez walks through his adventure of making his own cool looking Portal light plate. He introduces us to Snell’s law, how companies do this for other purposes with a sandwich approach with acrylics, window tint layers, diffuser layers, prism layers, reflective backing layers, etc).
Definitely a cool little project and worth a read if you’re interested in creating such a panel
Oregon was hailed as a national leader by Bernie Sanders and Democratic leadership when it pass Senate Bill 81 in 2015 offering free community college to residents. Fast forward to 2023 and it’s now on the chopping block.
A new report by the Oregon Higher Education Coordinating Committee (Which has been interestingly removed by the state and replaced with a much slicker brochure-style with NONE of the relevant data that summarizes these failures. The original report is still on the wayback machine and I include a local copy here) found that the Oregon Promise has failed by almost every measure. Here’s just one of their conclusions:
It has failed to encourage more high-school graduates to enroll in college, failed to narrow equity gaps in enrollment, and failed to increase college completion rates. And while it has helped a small number of students afford to go to college, most low-income students approved for the program still can’t meet the costs of higher education.
“While Oregon had some unique issues, overall the findings are not unique to Oregon,” he said. “Other places where this has been tried, you find a small pop in enrollment the first couple of years, and then it comes back down to pre-program levels, doesn’t really seem to do much in the long run to boost enrollment, or even movement onto four-year degrees.”
Articles:
Rie Kudan has won Japan’s most prestigious literary award, the Akutagawa Prize, with her most recent book: The Tokyo Tower of Sympathy. The judges praised the book, with one even calling it ‘flawless’.
What came next is unexpected. She revealed that she use AI to write parts of her novel (The Times). She revealed about 5% of the book was verbatim sentences she generated using AI.
This wasn’t the first time AI has won a top prize either. The winner of 2022’s Colorado State Fair’s prize for digital art also turned out to be AI-generated.
Nor is it the first time AI has won a writing prize. Journalism professor Shen Yang at Beijing’s Tsinghua University wanted to write a science fiction novel about the metaverse and humanoid robots. The AI ended up generating his entire book – which then took out a national science fiction award Jiangsu Science Writers Association . Using 66 different prompts, the AI drafted ‘Land of Memories‘ in just 3 hours.
After we went through dozens of prompts, the AI generated all of the content – from the pen name, title and text to accompanying pictures. And it’s not half bad. Here’s an excerpt:
In the metaverse’s edge, lies the ‘Land of Memories’, a forbidden realm where humans are barred. Solid illusions crafted by amnesiac humanoid robots and AI that had lost memories populate its domain. Any intruder, be it human or artificial, will have their memories drained away, forever trapped within its forbidden embrace.
Land of Memories
Links:
I didn’t even know an Excel world championship even existed, but Andrew Ngai, a 37-year-old Australian actuary, has won for the 3rd straight time.
He gives us mere mortals some tips